Winner of the 2021 Rick Campbell Chapbook Award

DEAR COLLAPSING LANDSCAPE
Not even you can account
for the tremble of each leaf.

Not the mountain. Not the moon. Not even
the unremarkable stars which open their own wounds
could imagine the grotesque performances
you have staged.

No longer will I trace your rolling
incarnations which once seemed to form
a silent argument against dying.

DEAR COYOTE’S BREATH
Your father has left to join the circus. He will be the breeze below the soles of the tightrope walker. Everyone misses your sense of humor. A clever one-liner inscribed on the winter air. Or the deeper ironies that rest just under the warmth of the coyote’s snout. Are you still married to the ghost of that jack rabbit? Do you remember when you were young and the morning fog could feed a whole family? If you return, how will we recognize you? If all the coyotes should die, then what will you become?

Praise for Theater of No Mistakes

There is in painting a Southwestern surrealism, and these poems often speak with the gifts those artworks in their figurations and colorings have offered. The lines in these poems often feel like masterly brushstrokes—of surprise, of unnerving juxtaposition, of possibility. “Let the big / hand answer to the hours. Let the small hand answer / to us. You alone are what keeps you awake at night.” Rather than being bogged down in any tradition, however, or following anybody’s rules, these poems take sure flight and find a sky of their own. — Alberto Ríos

In M.L. Martin’s surrealist series, the desert is stage, actor, scene, and symbol. Musical syntax delight and beckon, syncopating with the undulating heat waves from distant mirages. The prose poems speak to the haunted life among the ocotillo and the palo verde with images depicting the sharp horizon, populating the empty spaces of the Sonoran Desert with strange finery. Martin’s ekphrastic meditations are equal parts sublime and sonorous. — Oliver de la Paz